5. Patents and Y2K

There are a variety of software patents relating to would-be solutions to Year 2000 problems; I have collected together links to the Delphion Patent Site.

Some are rather particular to formats used in mainframe applications, but some sure look like they'd represent common practice, things any programmer worth his salary should be able to recreate...

• US5758336: Date format and date conversion procedure using a packed binary format

• US5668989: Two-digit hybrid radix year numbers for year 2000 and beyond

• US5630118: System and method for modifying and operating a computer system to perform date operations on date fields spanning centuries

• US5761668: Method and apparatus for converting computer software and databases for the year 2000

• US5644762: Method and apparatus for recording and reading date data having coexisting formats

• US5737735: Method and apparatus for recording and reading date data having coexisting formats

• US5600836: System and method for processing date-dependent information which spans one or two centuries

• US5806063: Date formatting and sorting for dates spanning the turn of the century

  This appears to be the most critical "Y2K Patent," representing the common windowing scheme.